


Dream's Promise

by galatiq



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Clay | Dream-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Dream is slightly nicer, Gen, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, No Romance, Real world mechanics, Sick Character, Sleepy Bois Inc in da back, This Does Not End Well, You Have Been Warned, i didn't study, i literally have an exam tomorrow oh no, why do I always write sad stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28972185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galatiq/pseuds/galatiq
Summary: At the start of Tommy's exile Dream made a promise to himself.He's doing his best to keep it.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit, TommyInnit & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 230





	Dream's Promise

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't want to put exactly what happens in the tags so I don't want to spoil the fic but be warned this does not end well, I want to make you feel sad.  
> What I will say though is that there are mild descriptions of gore, lots of descriptions of illness, and mentions of manipulation.  
> Dream is nicer than canon, but reminder that he's still a P.O.S. :)  
> this is set when tommy first gets put into exile because i had this idea then but i have been too busy until now to write it.  
> have fun good luck please cry thank you ily

Way back when Dream had led Tommy and Wilbur away from L’Manberg, pulling Tommy away from everything he had ever known like a disgruntled dog on a leash and Ghostbur trailing happily behind, he had promised himself that no matter what happened in exile, Tommy would not die on his watch.

He needed the boy alive to accomplish his goal of true chaos under his rule. Tommy was an agent of chaos; if he was guided on the right path, he would be infinitely useful to the cause. And better yet, Tommy brought the one thing to the server Dream needed to control everyone, attachment. Even though now he was the least likely candidate for Tommy’s aid, Dream was certain he could convince the boy to help, even if he had to use less than moral methods to achieve it.

And Tommy was young. He had a whole life ahead of him, even if decades of it had already been removed by the insurmountable amount of stress that came from war. Dream had caused a good portion of that stress, he knew it. He only hoped that the day Tommy took his last breath, he could be held only partially accountable for his death.

So, no matter how infuriating the boy was, no matter how much he stubbornly refused to remove his armor, no matter how many times he teased Dream by playing snippets of his discs, Dream refrained from physically retaliating against Tommy. He had much better ways to settle the score, and wasn’t he already by convincing Tommy he was his only friend? Dream didn’t need to be violent to hurt Tommy.

Except for that one time.

It had been the very first day of exile, after all those hours of rowing across the ocean. Dream’s arms had begun to ache in the anticipation of the return trip, and he had been irritable despite his small victory in the betrayal of Tubbo. Tommy had been upset, and as petulant as ever, and when he had been asked to empty his pockets and lose the last of his past, Tommy had refused and yelled with angry pricks of tears in his eyes.

Dream had struck him with his sword, watching the boy stumble back in shock as the tears poured over his cheeks and mixed with the rain in the dirt. It wasn’t more than a shallow slash crossing over Tommy’s shoulder to his chest, though it was long. As Tommy hissed and gritted his teeth against the pain, regret and guilt rose from the deepest recesses of Dream’s chest, but they were chased away again by Ghostbur rushing to Tommy’s side, quick to pull bandages out and sooth Tommy in the way that one would sooth a child who had skinned their knee.

Though Dream was confident in the moment that it would not seriously harm Tommy, he was glad the boy he had exiled had someone to take care of him while he was injured.

A week later, Dream had sent Ghostbur away.

Tommy, who was already weakened by exile, would certainly not be able to endure another hit like that without someone to by his side to take care of him.

So Dream was cautious. He counted to ten when he needed to and spoke with a tongue coated in poison rather than with a blade. When Tommy tempted him with his toes hanging over lava, his back turned to him a glaring target in Dream’s eye, he took his hand and placed it on Tommy’s shoulder, guiding him away from a demise that would take no hard work on his part.

And weeks later, when Dream’s visits to Tommy began to be filled with the malleable despair that radiated from the boy like the smell that clung to him, and Tommy’s dull eyes looked up to Dream in timid respect, he was certain he had done everything right.

And, now, as he returned to Tommy’s Logstedshire with the aim of offering the exiled boy a chance to return to L’Manberg for a few short hours, hopeful of earning his loyalty once and for all, Dream was grateful for his promise to himself all those weeks ago, for his restraint and self-control.

As his feet touched the shores of Tommy’s camp, Dream called out to the boy with a singsong voice, explosives and shovel in hand, and stood, waiting for the boy to scurry to the crest of the hill to greet him in the pitifully excited way he always did, like a puppy who couldn’t help but come crawling back after it had been kicked. While he waited, Dream surveyed the grounds for any new additions Tommy had added. There were none, but sometimes Tommy went mining for days at a time and would come back with riches Dream would keep for himself.

Perhaps Tommy was still in the mines. Dream couldn’t see any signs of him, which was strange in itself, but stranger still was the idea that he could be in the mines, since Dream had made it clear to him last visit when he would return.

“Tommy!” Dream called again, walking up the slope of the hill to get a better view of Logstedshire.

Tommy was not in his tent, nor in the storage space he had created. The stripped log walls Ghostbur had built were empty, and the thought that Tommy had left Logstedshire, had abandoned Dream, started to whisper in Dream’s ear.

“Tommy!” Dream barked, whirling around as if the boy would suddenly show up now when he hadn’t before. Each pulse of his heart hammered in the undeniable truth, that Tommy had escaped, had pretended to like Dream while he bided his time, and Dream rushed up to the vantage point of the cliff by the sea.

And visible from the cliff, on the other side of the point, was a structure of wood facing the ocean. If Dream squinted, he could see a bench and a jukebox, and if he strained his eyes, so faint it could have been his imagination, he could see blond hair blowing the in the breeze.

Dream stormed through the forest to the pier, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles popped. Why hadn’t Tommy come when called? He knew the consequences of disobeying Dream. There would be even graver consequences for making Dream believe he had left.

When he could see the wood of the pier again, Dream began to speak, sure he was within earshot.

“Tommy,” he spoke in the cold warning tone that he knew frightened Tommy more than his shouting. “Tommy, why didn’t you come?” Dream pushed through the last of the brush, and froze, venomous words caught on his tongue.

Tommy lay on the wood, arms and legs flopped down haphazardly and face smushed into the ground in ways that looked to be too uncomfortable to be of his own volition. He was pale, except for his cheeks that were flamed with blotches of flush, and his skin glistened with a sheen of sweat. Eyes scrunched; Tommy’s face was pulled into a grimace.

“Tommy!”

Dream was at the boy’s side in an instant. Hundreds of questions bubbled up inside him, but the most blaring one was the question of what had happened to Tommy. Hands hesitant but steady, Dream patted at the boy’s cheek with as much force as he dared.

“Tommy?” He whispered, breath stolen from his lungs by the worry that gripped them.

Tommy’s expression tightened, brow furrowing, and he let out a pained groan, and Dream’s heart skipped a beat, but then his face relaxed as little as it could and Tommy went back to whatever unconscious state he had been in, and Dream’s heart dropped. The bright heat emanating up into his palm from where he rested it on Tommy’s cheek was only worsening the dread.

“Okay, Tommy,” Dream muttered, more to himself than the boy. He wiped some of the sweat off of Tommy’s forehead with his sleeve. “We’re gonna get you back to Logstedshire. You’re gonna be fine, okay?”

With careful movements, Dream hooked an arm around the back of Tommy’s neck, and the other beneath his knees, and then with a heave, Tommy was lying against him. The boy hardly stirred at all with the jostling, only shifting his head the tiniest bit to rest it better on Dream’s chest. The smallest part of his clammy forehead was touching Dream’s neck, and it felt like hot coals.

“Oh, Tommy,” he murmured. Double-checking that he had a firm grip on the boy, Dream began picking his way through the forest back to Tommy’s camp.

Tommy looked horribly miserable curled up in his makeshift bed, shivering even though Dream had covered him in all the blankets he could find. A wet cloth lay over Tommy’s forehead, one that Dream changed every hour or so. A bucket sat next to his head, thankfully empty for the moment.

Dream had been watching over Tommy for almost a day now. He had seen the sun set and rise, and had protected the sick boy from monsters throughout the night. While he himself hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep, that was all Tommy had done. Dream had managed with some difficulty to get him to drink, but it was hard to when the teen wasn’t conscious enough to stop himself from choking.

Dream wasn’t a nurse. The only first aid he knew applied to injuries gained on the battlefield, and even then, it was only temporary until he could find someone like Bad or Ponk to treat it better. He had no experience in treating the ill, especially not on a remote island with no way of contacting the mainland. Dream had no idea whether he was supposed to let Tommy sweat it out or try to stop his brain from cooking in the sauna that had to be his skull at the moment. All Dream really knew was to keep the boy hydrated, and to feed him at the first opportunity that arose.

So far, there had been none. Tommy had been completely conked out for the entirety of the time Dream had been there, and he showed no signs of waking anytime soon. No loud sound Dream made was enough to disrupt the boy’s slumber, and Dream had made plenty when he dropped the bucket onto his toe earlier.

Dream figured if Tommy didn’t wake up by tomorrow, he would try to feed him in his sleep. If he stuck to broth and stock, then it wouldn’t be much more difficult than getting Tommy to drink. For now, though, Dream would nap while the sun was still high in the sky and Tommy was stable under the covers.

It was dusk when Tommy first stirred. He blinked up at Dream with bright, leaking eyes as Dream tipped a bowl of rabbit stew over his lips and down his throat, and then settled back to sleep. The only thing that came from Tommy’s mouth was a few coughs and groans, until an hour after he had fallen back asleep when the stew came rushing back up and Dream was just barely quick enough to hold the bucket up to Tommy.

He took a glass of water much better when he woke up in the middle of the night, though Dream had to jump up and ward off a few spiders that had taken his lapse in his vigil as an opportunity to pounce. By the time Dream had returned to Tommy’s bedside, covered in spider goo and wrapping silk into a spool around his hand, the boy had slipped away again.

Just before dawn, Tommy woke up spluttering, spat a good amount of bile into the bucket Dream had offered, and then lay back, panting with wheezy, phlegmy breaths. As Dream carefully replaced the damp cloth over his head and checked his temperature with the back of his hand against Tommy’s cheek, the boy stared up with hazy, unseeing eyes. They turned to Dream only when he sat back on his haunches, and the blues of them were almost glowing compared to how dull they had been the last time Dream had visited.

“Dream?” Tommy asked, voice soft.

“Yes?”

“Where’s Dad?”

And of course, Tommy would remind Dream that someone normally took better care of him. Of course, he would make sure Dream knew at the point where he was most scared for Tommy’s life that he had a family far away and unreachable. It was such a Tommy thing to do!

“Not here,” Dream muttered sourly, and Tommy let his eyes fall shut, and that was the end of that.

Tommy started to wake up more and become more aware while he was. Granted, it still wasn’t for long, and he didn’t seem to remember much of the past few days, but it was promising. Sometimes he managed to keep down whatever stew Dream poured past his lips, but other times Dream would have to dart across the room and guide Tommy’s head past the rim of the bucket. It wasn’t a monumental, or linear, recovery, which was concerning, but Dream decided that any recovery was better than none at all.

It had been a few more days of this cycle, and Dream had barely gotten any sleep. At one point, he thought the teen’s fever had broke, and he allowed himself more than an hour to rest, but when he had woken up, it was just as bad as before, if not worse.

Currently, Tommy had just fallen back asleep after drinking a few sips of water, and Dream had figured it would be okay if he went out for a while to forage for more supplies for Tommy. The sun was shining brightly over head, swelteringly hot, and Dream had just killed a few rabbits. He was entering the tent with the rabbits swaying at his waist when he realized something had gone horribly, terribly wrong.

Tommy, who had been so peaceful in sleep, despite how sweaty and feverish he was, was thrashing on the bed, seizing.

Dream, who had no precedent for handling seizures, could only watch with painful helplessness as the boy was thrust about erratically.

Eventually it became too much for him to bear and he rushed to Tommy’s side, dropping his hunting gear at the door, and grabbing onto Tommy’s shoulders. He tried to hold the boy still, but Tommy was surprisingly strong in his illness. Finally, after a few gut-wrenching moments that felt like years to Dream, Tommy stopped, sudden as the seizure had come on. Dream froze, still clutching tightly onto Tommy’s shoulders and panting, though he didn’t know why.

Tommy groaned under his hold, a sign that he was waking up again.

“Tommy!” Dream couldn’t stop himself from shaking the boy more awake. “Tommy, what the hell was _that_?”

“What the fuck, Dream?” Tommy grumbled, cracking a sick-encrusted eye open to stare at the man above him.

“What was that?” Dream repeated.

Tommy, who seemed to have a sudden moment of clarity, peered into Dream’s eyes, which were uncovered by the mask he had forgone the third day of taking care of the boy.

“Did you check the wound?”

Dream’s stomach dropped.

His heart stuttered, and he suddenly felt like he might be the next one of them yakking into the bucket.

“Wh-what?” He breathed, eyes saucer wide.

Tommy didn’t answer, already almost gone, but he made a small gesture with his hand towards his shoulder before passing out again.

Cold seeped up from the hole where Dream’s stomach had been.

With baited breaths and deft fingers, Dream tried to pull back Tommy’s shirt, pushing away the compass Tommy always wore. When the shirt didn’t budge, he gave up and cut away at it, opening the front. That time, when Dream saw what awaited him and his stomach dropped a second time, he actually did throw up.

A wound, the one Dream had so carelessly inflicted upon Tommy at the start of his exile, stretched across Tommy’s chest and shoulder, unhealed and horribly infected. It had festered and rotted, and parts of the skin around it had actually necrotized, which Dream had only ever heard of. Sickly coloured pus oozed up from the slash, hardened and cracked in some places.

The source of Tommy’s unbeaten illness had been lying under Dream’s nose this entire time, getting worse and worse every day that Dream had thought it was a normal sickness.

Dream felt incredibly stupid.

In fact, words couldn’t even begin to describe the whirlwind of emotions inside Dream, but the closest one he could come up with was guilt.

Dream needed health potions to heal this. Dream didn’t have health potions. The soonest Dream could get health potions would be in a day or too, but Tommy didn’t seem like he would last much longer, and Dream was afraid to leave him alone.

Dream cursed himself for not checking to see if there had been any underlying cause for Tommy’s sudden illness. He cursed himself for causing the wound in the first place. He cursed himself for never checking on how it was healing. He began to curse Tommy for hiding it from him, but he quickly cut himself off.

Dream’s carelessness had doomed Tommy.

No matter how he chose to go on with treating Tommy, he wouldn’t be able to save him from succumbing to the infection.

The boy in question made a sound of pain in his sleep when Dream ghosted his fingers over the cut.

No, Dream couldn’t think like that. He had made a promise to himself, all those weeks ago, and he intended to keep it.

Tommy had to live.

So far, all Dream had done to treat Tommy was remove the dead skin and clean away the pus. He had covered up the wound with the gauze he always carried and intended to change the wrappings when the sun rose in a few hours. Despite this, he knew that even if the wound healed up now the sickness remained.

Tommy had seized once more during the night, but Dream, who was guiding a skeleton away from the camp, only caught the tail end of it. The boy had been awake for it that time, and looked up at Dream in horror when he returned.

“What did you do to me?” Tommy wheezed out. His eyes were glistening and full of bitter fear. He tried to move away from Dream when he approached, but Tommy winced and aborted the motion.

“Tommy,” Dream stiffened. All the fight he thought he had trained out of the boy had returned. “Tommy, I-”

“ _What did you do?_ ”

Tommy glared at Dream, shoulders heaving from his outburst, breath whistling through his chest, but then he was distracted by a wince and a coughing fit. Dream quickly swooped down towards the water he had left next to Tommy’s bed, rubbing his hand on Tommy’s back and trying to press the cup to his lips.

“Drink this,” he insisted, but Tommy batted away the cup, spilling it even as weak as he was.

“I don’t want your poison water!” He spat out, regaining control of his breath. “Exiling me wasn’t enough, huh? You’re going to kill me too?”

“I’m trying to help you!” Dream explained, trying to keep a firm lid on the anger that was bubbling up.

“I don’t want to hear it!”

“Tommy, you’re delirious!”

“Oh, shut up!”

Dream opened his mouth to shout back, but he snapped it shut just as quickly. Tommy gave him a look of contempt. Turning on his heel, water bucket in hand, Dream stormed off to the ocean’s edge to retrieve more water to boil. When he returned, Tommy was asleep again.

Regardless of how many times Dream cleaned and rebandaged the old wound, Tommy was still sick, and steadily getting worse. The frequency of his seizures increased, and the clarity of his lessening waking moments decreased. At one point, when Dream was trying to force food down his throat, Tommy called him Phil, asked Phil where Tubbo was, and burst into tears when Dream told him in a poor imitation of Phil’s accent that Tubbo was too busy to see him at the moment.

Tommy went back to being unable to keep anything down, or outright refused to take it in the first place. Soup had been splashed, vomit had been spewed, and water had been spilled, and Tommy was getting weaker by the hour.

On the second night after Dream started to treat his wound, after a seizure that had lasted too long for Dream to be confident in Tommy’s recovery anymore, Tommy looked up at Dream with eyes that had gone foggy and dull as opposed to the fever-bright they had been earlier. With a small, weak voice, and more vulnerability than Dream thought he would have ever shown in his right mind, Tommy asked him,

“Am I going to die?”

Dream froze, his own eyes unable to stray from the boy’s. Dream had to make a choice. Looking into Tommy’s eyes, Dream could see a sort of grim resignation that stole his words away. Even if he lied now, Tommy would know.

“Probably,” Dream admitted.

Tommy blinked, thought, and then answered.

“Can I go see Tubbo?”

He clutched at the compass around his neck.

Dream sighed shakily.

“I don’t think you’ll make it that long.”

Tommy looked down at the compass.

“Oh.”

He looked back up at Dream.

“Stay with me ‘till I’m gone?”

Dream ignored the knot in his throat.

“Of course.”

The next day, Tommy didn’t wake up at all. He whined, whimpered, and seized in his sleep, restless even in rest. Pale and shivering, his already poor breathing was shallow. Dream didn’t even bother with changing the bandages.

Instead, he sat by Tommy’s side the whole time. Even when his stomach cramped with hunger, he dared not leave the boy alone. With one hand, Dream pushed back Tommy’s sweaty hair, and with the other, he held onto Tommy’s hand.

Maybe a better person would’ve sung songs to the dying teen, or they would have told him stories to fill the choking silence, but Dream was not a better person, and silent it stayed.

If Dream had been a better person, he wouldn’t have broken his promise.

Finally, when the sky was streaked with oranges and reds, Tommy’s breaths thinned out. Dream watched as his brow furrowed, and he huffed with air that would’ve been a groan a week ago. Dream tightened his grip on Tommy’s hand as those, too, faded, and Tommy’s face softened.

The world was quiet when Tommy let out his last breath.

Dream buried Tommy by the pier. It was well hidden from prying eyes, and had a good view of the ocean that L’Manberg was across. Tommy, who had been so close to the country in life, would never be farther from it in death.

Dream wasn’t going to tell the people of Tommy’s country what had become of him. It wasn’t like they visited him anyway. It was better if they just forgot about Tommy entirely. It was better if they didn’t know that Dream had broken his promise, even if they hadn’t known about it in the first place.

He was already a villain enough.

It was early morning two days after Tommy had passed. Dream was watching the sunrise from the pier one last time, Tommy’s compass a heavy weight in his pocket. He had cleaned up Tommy’s bed and eliminated any and all signs of sick that he could find over the past few days, with a heavy sense of mourning spread out over his shoulders like a blanket as he worked.

He would be leaving Logstedshire for the last time today.

The mask Dream hadn’t worn in weeks was stifling over his face as his gaze travelled to the small stone he had engraved Tommy’s name on. Dream pressed his fingers to his lips, then pressed them to the rock, kneeling down to reach.

“I am so sorry,” he murmured with clenched eyes.

Dream stood, turning to leave, but an eerily familiar voice called out to him.

“Excuse me?”

Dream whipped around, jumping away from the person that had spoken. He clutched at his heart through his shirt as if to still its hammering. Looking around, he felt the blood drain from his face when his eyes locked on the figure.

A clean red and white shirt. Pale, see-through skin. Bright, ghostly eyes.

“Where am I?” Tommyinnit the ghost asked.

It seemed Dream could not escape his failed promise.

**Author's Note:**

> yeeaaaaaa  
> might make a second part idk i have ideas (it'll be in a series ooo idk how to do those yet but there's a first for everything)  
> now a funny bit that had me crying in editing  
> i was trying to edit the scene where dream takes off tommy's shirt to clean the wound and careless whisper started playing and completely changed the vibe and i had to go sit and take a breather for a second  
> ps get back at me by commenting cus then i will cry


End file.
